I’ll turn 63 years of age this Friday.
Some history to read. Unless you have something better to do.
Wednesday, July 1, 1959, at 8:14 AM Central Time, I arrived at Lincoln General Hospital.
I was screaming, all 21 inches, and seven pounds, 11 ounces worth.
Dr. Bernard F. Wendt billed my parents one hundred dollars for his delivery skills.
Eggheads who dabble in statistics categorize me as a member of the Baby Boomer Generation.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” was the most popular song in the country, the United States Flag had 49 stars as Alaska had become a state six months earlier, and the U.S. was only 52 days away from proclaiming Hawaii as the final member of the United States Family. Lincoln’s population was 125,000, the capacity of 36-year-old Memorial Stadium – the home of the University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team – was 32,000 … and Nebraska was still a member of the Big 7 Conference.
I arrived fashionably late – three weeks late, mind you – and even though it was July 1, it was unseasonably cool. My mother wore the same spring coat to the hospital that she wore on April 14, 1955, when Mom delivered my brother Blaine, also at Lincoln General.
My exhausted mother had two reasons to be happy. I was healthy, and I wasn’t born the same day the infamous Charlie Starkweather was executed. Mom’s biggest fear was that I would arrive the same day Starkweather was fried. It makes me wonder how the mothers of children born on December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, feel about their offspring.
My due date was June 11. But since Charles Starkweather was still on this planet, I decided to wait.
You’ll need to know your Nebraska criminal history to understand that little dig.
Starkweather, who went on a murder spree and eliminated the lives of 11 people between December 1957 and January 1958, was put to death in Nebraska’s electric chair on June 25, 1959.
Dad had taken a week’s vacation from his job at Norden Laboratory on West Cornhusker Highway to hang around the house in case I decided to show up.
I robbed Dad of a week’s vacation.
My baptism followed 40 days later during a ceremony at St. John’s Congregational Church in Lincoln.
Ten months later, I was walking on my own.
My parents, Clair and Phyllis Horn (who are at rest in the Valparaiso, NE cemetery), my older brother Blaine (now 67), and I resided in a small red brick home at 3345 Dudley Street in Lincoln – a home Mom and Dad purchased in 1958 for $8,000. The house was located two blocks south of the University of Nebraska Ag College. My only memories of living on Dudley Street are staring at the front door’s curtains while I was sitting on my mother’s lap and admiring a small parakeet Mom and Dad kept in a silver cage.
By the time I was three, we moved to a large home in Lincoln.
How did it come to be that I would make Alliance, Nebraska my home for the past 36 years?
That’s a story for next week.